RR-US450 Panasonic Voice Recorder

I want to shoot a video for YouTube and do it cheaply. I am going to shoot the video and audio at the same time, but record the sound onto the recorder (instead of using the built in microphone on a camcorder). I record audio with a $20 (cdn) external microphone. When I down load the audio to my computer and then play it back it sounds great.

When shooting a video, the most important thing to have is good quality audio (as odd as that is) and on its highest quality setting the RR-US450 does that. It is not a stereo recording, just mono. It's designed as a dictation device.

During the shoot, I will have to listen to the audio at the same time my subject is talking to be certain the audio is being recorded properly, and there is no odd background noise etc. The RR-US450 allows me to do this. When I plug in a set of headphones, I listen to the audio that is being recorded, I hear it through the headphones. Thus I can verify the audio is good as the shooting continues. It's exactly what I need.

It has a "ZOOM" mike, and it works well. It is a built in mike, and records voice well in a bigger room. With the ZOOM shut off, the voice is less clear. In short it has one typr of mike for big rooms, and another for smaller rooms and to record my own voice up close. Both are very good.

The recorder is designed to mainly record voice. This means it will do a very poor job at recording music. Again, this is perfect for me, because I want voice and not music. I can add music during editing if I need to. In a sense, for me, the recorder filters out unwanted sound and allows voice to come through.

My biggest drawback so far is, that the visual display does not light up, and thus impossible to adjust its setting in dim to dark situations.

I have an mp3 player, and I plug it into the USB port and treat it like a disk drive, copying files and deleting files etc with no special software needed to do this. With the recorder I have to install a 2 cd program of software. Only then can I download the sound files from the recorder. This means I will have to install the software onto every machine I intend to download to.

To the defense of the software, it is a text to speech program, with a too robotic sound for my liking (I would never use it).

It also is a speech to text program. It will type out what I say. It can do it in about 20 languages. (You can use it to learn another language apparently). I use English only. So, by recording my voice into folder "M" the speech recognition software will recognize my voice and transform it into text. It will do this only for folder "M". (It also has folders A,B,C).

Also, I can use the software for real time voice recognition with my computer. After plugging the mike into the computer I speak into the mike, and it instantly types it out. I haven't used it much (just tested it) but it did a good job. To get better results, I needed to "train" the software to recognize my voice (which I didn't do) but it did a good job without the training.

The software takes some effort to get used to. When you first load the software it asks for an "Authentication" phrase. None came with the package and I didn't give it one. I clicked on "Cancel" and the program continued to install properly, except I could not see any of the files on the recorder. (There is no authentication number or word that came with the recorder so I didn't know what phrase it wanted). Well, as it turns out, in order to "see" the recorder and thus download files from the recorder, I re-installed the software and made up an authentication phrase. After putting in the phrase, I was able to see the files on the recorder and manipulate them. I almost took it back because I couldn't download the recorder files. (Now I can).

The sound compression method is called TRC (Triple Rate Coder). I didn't know if it was good or bad, but I looked at other recorders and they use ADPM (or something like that) and that is quite old technology, so I decided to stick with the relatively newer compression method, TRC. The proof too, was the good sound quality when I played it back on my computer.

The instruction manual says it converts VM1 files into WAV files. I think VM1 files are the format that is stored inside the recorder. WAV files are very common, thus easily converted to other formats if needed.

When I use the recorder to playback voice, it sounds like the person is talking a bit faster, when compared to playing it back on my computer.

One draw back too is, it I need a USB port wire for the recorder. The USB connector on the recorder is smaller than the standard size on my computer, thus Panasonic supplies ya cord with a small USB connector on one end and a larger one (standard size) on the other end (to fit the computer). It's just one more thing for me to lose. On the other hand, if the USB connector on the recorder was the big enough to plug into my computers USB port, the physical size of the recorder would likely block all other USB ports on the front of my machine and, the recorder would weigh too much for the connector and on and on. So, as I write this, I see that the USB wire is a good idea.

Before having the RR-US450 I used a micro cassette tape voice recorder. It was poorer sound to be sure, and I could never use it for shooting a video. I have left it out in my vehicle many times when the temperature dipped to -25 and it still worked when it warmed up. I bought a digital voice recorder (not a Panasonic) and left it in my vehicle and the temperature dropped to -25 and the unit failed. It would not record, but it would playback one of the folders (not all). I was lucky to transcribe what I recorded before I threw it away. It didn't have a USB port, so I couldn't download any of the files. My point is, with the micro cassette I would have been able to take the tape out and play it on another recorder and not lose any information. My information would have been safe. No computer needed.

It seems the help files were written by a person whose has English as a second language. Thus sometimes the instructions were not clear.